When I enter the hospital, the doctors look at me pityingly and shake their heads. I guess I should be disheartened. That’s never a good sign in a hospital.

The lift is quiet. I arrive on the fourth floor and someone else gets in as I leave. She doesn’t even glance at me – it looks like she’s trying to be inconspicuous, though I’d recognize that hair anywhere. The woman that was going to be my mother-in-law just walked past me, and she didn’t even say hello. It must really be bad today, then.

Like that will stop me.

I tap lightly on the door and then enter. She lies on the bed, staring up at the shapes the dappled light makes on the white ceiling. Her green eyes are huge, the pupils dilated, and all the while, she’s humming happily. I take a deep breath and walk over to her. I don’t know why I’m doing this to myself. Maybe grief has turned me into a total masochist. If I don’t enjoy my own pain, I certainly act as if I do.

“Hello,” I say quietly. She sits bolt upright and stares at me.

“Hi,” she says cautiously. “Hi. Do I know you?”

“No,” I say calmly, trying not to alarm her. “I’m just here to see how you’re doing.”

She squints at my tattered and patched-up clothes, so unlike the ones that I’m used to.

“You don’t look like a doctor,” she says suspiciously.

‘That’s not my fault,’ I desperately want to say. ‘I had to drop out of Uni so I could spend days and nights by your side, remember?’

But it would be useless. Because of course you don’t remember.

“I’m not a doctor,” I say. Heck, I didn’t even get to finish my course. I was studying journalism. Don’t you remember? “I’m not going to try and give you medicine or anything. I’m just here to talk to you, see how you’re doing.”

She visibly relaxes, and I can see the dark circles beneath her eyes. Even though she is only nineteen, she looks an age older. I nervously swallow the lump in my throat and plunge onwards.

“So, how have you been lately?” my smile is ersatz, just like my calm. “Been well?”

Remember me, I silently beg her. Remember yourself.

“Yes,” she says, her brow furrowing in thought. “I found a note by my bed.” She tilts her head to the side, her dark hair dull in the fluorescent lights. “I don’t think it was addressed to me, though. I read it anyway – I suppose I shouldn’t’ve.”

I take a few deep, calming breaths. She twigged quickly today. She pushes her hair off her face and grins at me expectantly.

Oh, that smile. That smile is breaking my heart right now as I look at her, and she doesn’t even realize it.

“I don’t suppose it really matters,” I choke out. “I guess whoever it belongs to wouldn’t mind.”

“I shouldn’t think so,” she says, her eyes wide and shining with curiosity. “The way it was written, it sounded like she was dead.” She looks at my stricken expression and her face completely changes. She asks gently, “Did you know her?”

I used to, I think. I used to know her; I used to wake up every morning to find her sitting on my crappy kitchen bench, sipping coffee from a chipped mug. I used to hold her hand. Now she doesn’t even know my name.

“No, not really,” is what I say.

The two of us talk some more. We talk about the letter – she doesn’t realize it’s addressed to her, and she’s curious. She’s curious about the four pages filled with descriptions of a past she doesn’t remember. She’s curious about the love that is being confessed in the letter, and the long apologies. She’s curious about the author of this letter, and she doesn’t realize that he’s sitting right in front of her.

I mention a few movies that she doesn’t – can’t possibly – remember. She says she hasn’t seen them, but I remember watching them with her, her head on my shoulder and her hand in mine.

Every sentence is a knife to my heart. She doesn’t remember. She can’t remember.

That fight. I thank whoever it is up there in the ceiling that she doesn’t remember the fight. Because this is how it ends. We fought. It was about something stupid, it always was.

But that night, it was different. She got in her car and drove away. And she wrapped her little red Mini Cooper around a tree.

I remember crouching by the wreckage of her car, staring at the red panels lying on the road like the severed wings of a tortured butterfly. I remember the coldness of her hand, the flashing lights of the ambulance, the grim look on the doctor’s face as he approached me, clipboard in hand.

“She’s alive. But she doesn’t remember anything.”

She isn’t dead, but it certainly feels like it sometimes. She doesn’t have any idea who I am. She hasn’t any idea who anyone is, really, but it hurts me most that I’m just another face in a big, wide world that she has no memory of.

When it gets too much to bear, I stand to leave. I can’t feel guilty about leaving her, because within minutes she will forget that I even exist.

But I’ll be back tomorrow. I always come back.

I push my hair off my face and smile gently at her. She smiles back, a happy, dopey grin that makes my heart ache.

“It was really nice of you to come and see me,” she says happily. “You should come again sometime.”

I do, I think. I’m here every day, and every time I enter that door, you ask if you know me. Do you have any idea how much that hurts?

“I’ll try,” is what I say. I’m quite accustomed to not saying what I mean now.

When I reach for the doorknob, she says, “Wait,” and I look into her vacant eyes, willing her with all my heart for to remember me.

… She doesn’t.

She never does.

She comes pretty damn close sometimes, though.

“This may seem like a stupid question, but… Do I know you from somewhere?” she asks, her smile less sure than it was before.

Sometimes she gets so close it tears me apart.

“Yeah,” I whisper, tears forming in my eyes as I turn away from her. “You used to love me.”